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13 Responses to “Beautiful People with Javed Akhtar”
He makes some very true, very provocative remarks about how urbane, upper-class filmmakers have taken the working-class hero out of the equation, but I’m glad Sengupta doesn’t let him off the hook. She turns the tables on him a bit by asking him why his own kids are pretty much doing exactly what he’s got a problem with!
It’s maybe a bit unfair to pose that question, but Farhan Akhtar perhaps has had more influence with his first film than any other movie in creating the exact scenario that Javed seems to decry here.
Javed Akhtar did a chat on Indiafm/Bollywood Hungama a few years ago where I asked him this exact same question (about the disappearance of the working class, or even middle class, protagonist from Hindi films) and he gave the same kind of answer — ruefully agreeing with me, but not really suggesting a solution.
But, having said that, I agree with Akhatar that the person who asks why he is not able to influence at least his children does not have any experience as a parent.
Absolutely. One can defend the working class but it’s another matter to live the life!
And yeah, one sympathizes with the parent here but it’s hard to ignore the disparity (in every sense) between the cinema the father created and that of the son…
But at least Akhtar speaks with some thought and quite articulately about these things. This can’t be said about anyone else in the industry.
I think Javed Akhtar probably intuits that you cannot just create certain subjects when the audience (which is to say the larger socio-cultural rubric of the audience) is not really with you. How do you give radical cinema or revolutionary cinema to an audience that does not desire it? Akhtar does well to talk about the last 10-15 years because all of this is really a story of the ‘new India’. A generation fed on the diet of globalization, certainly the biggest beneficiary of a more dynamic economy, but also a somewhat older generation newly empowered, this whole mix has been a somewhat toxic one inasmuch as it has bred a certain political and social conservatism. People who want it all, think they can have it all and believe there need not be any cost to all of this.
If globalization destabilizes existing economic hierarchies, introduces new opportunities in this sense it also does the same for social arrangements. But there are instances where a certain contradictory ‘marriage’ can be sustained for a while — those who are beneficiaries of the new system and also feel they can maintain their ‘traditional’ values, in fact return to them with a certain force. The Barjatya universe involves putting your head in the sand and ‘regressing’ to am imagined extended family paradise. The Johar world is the more symptomatic one as it does both. One is awash in the new consumerism but it’s also all about loving your family! Things change a bit and you get to IHLS which is the ‘head fake’ moment of the same dynamic. You repeat all the moves of the 90s love story except that you pretend to scoff at it. In the end you get there despite yourself. This too is a move inaugurated by DCH (as GF reminded us the other day this was probably the most influential film of the decade). Those who have been following me since those days will probably recognize this criticism but Farhan Akhtar (we began with his father) eventually opted for a conservative ending in DCH. In the second half everything gradually becomes more and more ‘regular’ and conformist. When DCH ends it’s not a film Johar disagrees with! In some ways Farhan Akhtar provided the even better configuration for this age. Johar created a world that also started seeming archaic somewhat soon despite Johar’s best attempts to update it. Even the emotional tone of the narratives was something that a younger audience had trouble dealing with. We then entered with Farhan Akhtar into a certain ‘ironic’ age where the first casualty is really enough emotional investment by the viewer. It’s not just that the films have to be kept light, they must have all the weight and aftertaste of M&Ms! And most days I’d take the latter!
Getting back to Akhtar Sr how is it possible to really do anything serious? The ones that work in this sense try to hoodwink the audience even when they’re authentic. So for example I loved Ghajini and loved it’s box office story equally but you had here Aamir realizing how sick his audience was and doing a masala film with a built-in ‘excuse’ (the memento angle and so on).
In the light of all this the response to Raavan isn’t exactly puzzling. I saw it for the first time and realized it didn’t have a hope in hell. Some people I know who liked it were quite mystified as to what was so problematic about the narrative that people had reacted so violently. Well, it is not the narrative that is a problem. People who think this is a boring film are either on a hard drug or need to be! The objection is precisely the ideological one. Because Raavan argues against every bit of the dominant ideological framework I have just been describing in every sense imaginable. The Ramayana subversion is actually the least of the problems.
Which is also why you see the problems Abhishek is going through. How does an actor develop a successful model doing the truly authentic or truly different if at the same unlike Aamir he chooses not to game the system (which is to say multiple films like Mangal pandey!)? This is not about mixing it up and doing films like Italian Job along the way. That just ensures the star’s viability and creates further capital for the risky. But it doesn’t exactly make the other kind of film successful. So it’s a challenge, a very serious one today. One looks at Tamil cinema today and one realizes there is such disparity within the same country just between Chennai and Bombay! One could take this to be a hopeful sign. Perhaps Bollywood could be changed also. But I am more pessimistic. Because I think that an audience completely untethered to ‘history’ in any true sense might be completely ‘lost’. Which is by the way why I obsess with Abhishek (one of the reasons at least). Bachchan ‘is’ Bombay film history today. He represents it all by himself. Abhishek is therefore uniquely placed in terms of that link. The only contemporary ‘Bollywood’ star for whom history can never cease being an issue. This is a burden of course but also an opportunity. If any authentic sense of cinema cannot be renewed at this ‘site’ it will not be for at least another generation. Perhaps never. Which is why one should always want his wager to succeed.
“So for example I loved Ghajini and loved it’s box office story equally but you had here Aamir realizing how sick his audience was and doing a masala film with a built-in ‘excuse’ (the memento angle and so on).”
Assuredly, the Memento angle helped sell this film to people otherwise nauseated by masala, as did Aamir’s involvement in the film.
The “built-in excuses” can only wean people off though, eventually they’re going to have be tested by being thrown into the deep end and in the first such test (Raavan) we’ve failed miserably.
in this sense ‘new Tamil cinema’ is really the compromise between the old masala and new multiplex cinema. And it’s not a bad one! In many ways masala survived in post-Rajni Tamil cinema largely as B grade but for Vikram’s intervention (and he too rightly intuited that he had reached a logical end with Anniyan). You have Ajith or Vijay doing B grade stuff that only runs in certain kinds of theaters, now there is Surya doing a lot of it with a wink at the audience, specially the multiplex one, but all of this is not reinvention. And even in Tamil the best young talents are not doing masala though they are definitely rooted to the tradition which is why ‘new Tamil cinema’ is not the lesser in terms of authenticity. It also allows for a more auteurist grammar to remain in place. But it is hard on ‘stars’! In some ways Vikram now faces an odd crisis. He is clearly ‘the star’ in the post-Rajni era. But he has exhausted regular masala and does not wish to simply repeat things. But he might be too big for those smaller canvases of the ‘new’. It will be interesting to see how he fares but we see in any case a star who has more or less walked away from his dominant genres.
Similarly in Bombay masala cinema at one point in time answered a political need. It was the dominant paradigm for a certain cinema of protest. Today the problem precisely is that no one wants protest. We are all conformists now! And to the extent that there still is plenty of protest left in the country those audiences have been squeezed out of the multiplex economy. So it’s just a vicious cycle in Bombay.
There is a third model here of Telugu cinema. Where it’s still 1980 except for technical refinement and no one minds! In fairness though the Bollywood overlap in some of the important centers here perhaps creates a space for an over the top local cinema.
Javed’s best attributes are his humour and his script-writing. His political views are laced with anger if provoked and disagreed to. And he’s a tad overrated as a poet… (I didn’t say lyricist…)
Still think that though he and Salim were more ‘inspired’ than original yet their ‘adapted’ scripts were mostly quite topical, and taut.
June 30, 2010 at 2:39 PM
Some interesting comments in part 2 on tribal lands and Maoist violence.
June 30, 2010 at 2:40 PM
also check out his comments on the film industry in part 3..
June 30, 2010 at 4:07 PM
He makes some very true, very provocative remarks about how urbane, upper-class filmmakers have taken the working-class hero out of the equation, but I’m glad Sengupta doesn’t let him off the hook. She turns the tables on him a bit by asking him why his own kids are pretty much doing exactly what he’s got a problem with!
It’s maybe a bit unfair to pose that question, but Farhan Akhtar perhaps has had more influence with his first film than any other movie in creating the exact scenario that Javed seems to decry here.
June 30, 2010 at 4:18 PM
and he responds in witty fashion on the kids saying ‘usually they’re the last to listen to their parents’!
June 30, 2010 at 10:19 PM
I thought that was pretty fair question. It is always easy to preach than follow (that is true for most of us).
I liked the first part.
July 1, 2010 at 7:00 AM
Javed Akhtar did a chat on Indiafm/Bollywood Hungama a few years ago where I asked him this exact same question (about the disappearance of the working class, or even middle class, protagonist from Hindi films) and he gave the same kind of answer — ruefully agreeing with me, but not really suggesting a solution.
But, having said that, I agree with Akhatar that the person who asks why he is not able to influence at least his children does not have any experience as a parent.
July 1, 2010 at 7:02 AM
I guess he can’t give the real answer, which is, everyone wants to go where the money is.
July 1, 2010 at 8:41 AM
Absolutely. One can defend the working class but it’s another matter to live the life!
And yeah, one sympathizes with the parent here but it’s hard to ignore the disparity (in every sense) between the cinema the father created and that of the son…
But at least Akhtar speaks with some thought and quite articulately about these things. This can’t be said about anyone else in the industry.
July 1, 2010 at 9:15 AM
I think Javed Akhtar probably intuits that you cannot just create certain subjects when the audience (which is to say the larger socio-cultural rubric of the audience) is not really with you. How do you give radical cinema or revolutionary cinema to an audience that does not desire it? Akhtar does well to talk about the last 10-15 years because all of this is really a story of the ‘new India’. A generation fed on the diet of globalization, certainly the biggest beneficiary of a more dynamic economy, but also a somewhat older generation newly empowered, this whole mix has been a somewhat toxic one inasmuch as it has bred a certain political and social conservatism. People who want it all, think they can have it all and believe there need not be any cost to all of this.
If globalization destabilizes existing economic hierarchies, introduces new opportunities in this sense it also does the same for social arrangements. But there are instances where a certain contradictory ‘marriage’ can be sustained for a while — those who are beneficiaries of the new system and also feel they can maintain their ‘traditional’ values, in fact return to them with a certain force. The Barjatya universe involves putting your head in the sand and ‘regressing’ to am imagined extended family paradise. The Johar world is the more symptomatic one as it does both. One is awash in the new consumerism but it’s also all about loving your family! Things change a bit and you get to IHLS which is the ‘head fake’ moment of the same dynamic. You repeat all the moves of the 90s love story except that you pretend to scoff at it. In the end you get there despite yourself. This too is a move inaugurated by DCH (as GF reminded us the other day this was probably the most influential film of the decade). Those who have been following me since those days will probably recognize this criticism but Farhan Akhtar (we began with his father) eventually opted for a conservative ending in DCH. In the second half everything gradually becomes more and more ‘regular’ and conformist. When DCH ends it’s not a film Johar disagrees with! In some ways Farhan Akhtar provided the even better configuration for this age. Johar created a world that also started seeming archaic somewhat soon despite Johar’s best attempts to update it. Even the emotional tone of the narratives was something that a younger audience had trouble dealing with. We then entered with Farhan Akhtar into a certain ‘ironic’ age where the first casualty is really enough emotional investment by the viewer. It’s not just that the films have to be kept light, they must have all the weight and aftertaste of M&Ms! And most days I’d take the latter!
Getting back to Akhtar Sr how is it possible to really do anything serious? The ones that work in this sense try to hoodwink the audience even when they’re authentic. So for example I loved Ghajini and loved it’s box office story equally but you had here Aamir realizing how sick his audience was and doing a masala film with a built-in ‘excuse’ (the memento angle and so on).
In the light of all this the response to Raavan isn’t exactly puzzling. I saw it for the first time and realized it didn’t have a hope in hell. Some people I know who liked it were quite mystified as to what was so problematic about the narrative that people had reacted so violently. Well, it is not the narrative that is a problem. People who think this is a boring film are either on a hard drug or need to be! The objection is precisely the ideological one. Because Raavan argues against every bit of the dominant ideological framework I have just been describing in every sense imaginable. The Ramayana subversion is actually the least of the problems.
Which is also why you see the problems Abhishek is going through. How does an actor develop a successful model doing the truly authentic or truly different if at the same unlike Aamir he chooses not to game the system (which is to say multiple films like Mangal pandey!)? This is not about mixing it up and doing films like Italian Job along the way. That just ensures the star’s viability and creates further capital for the risky. But it doesn’t exactly make the other kind of film successful. So it’s a challenge, a very serious one today. One looks at Tamil cinema today and one realizes there is such disparity within the same country just between Chennai and Bombay! One could take this to be a hopeful sign. Perhaps Bollywood could be changed also. But I am more pessimistic. Because I think that an audience completely untethered to ‘history’ in any true sense might be completely ‘lost’. Which is by the way why I obsess with Abhishek (one of the reasons at least). Bachchan ‘is’ Bombay film history today. He represents it all by himself. Abhishek is therefore uniquely placed in terms of that link. The only contemporary ‘Bollywood’ star for whom history can never cease being an issue. This is a burden of course but also an opportunity. If any authentic sense of cinema cannot be renewed at this ‘site’ it will not be for at least another generation. Perhaps never. Which is why one should always want his wager to succeed.
July 1, 2010 at 9:51 AM
“So for example I loved Ghajini and loved it’s box office story equally but you had here Aamir realizing how sick his audience was and doing a masala film with a built-in ‘excuse’ (the memento angle and so on).”
Assuredly, the Memento angle helped sell this film to people otherwise nauseated by masala, as did Aamir’s involvement in the film.
The “built-in excuses” can only wean people off though, eventually they’re going to have be tested by being thrown into the deep end and in the first such test (Raavan) we’ve failed miserably.
July 1, 2010 at 12:33 PM
in this sense ‘new Tamil cinema’ is really the compromise between the old masala and new multiplex cinema. And it’s not a bad one! In many ways masala survived in post-Rajni Tamil cinema largely as B grade but for Vikram’s intervention (and he too rightly intuited that he had reached a logical end with Anniyan). You have Ajith or Vijay doing B grade stuff that only runs in certain kinds of theaters, now there is Surya doing a lot of it with a wink at the audience, specially the multiplex one, but all of this is not reinvention. And even in Tamil the best young talents are not doing masala though they are definitely rooted to the tradition which is why ‘new Tamil cinema’ is not the lesser in terms of authenticity. It also allows for a more auteurist grammar to remain in place. But it is hard on ‘stars’! In some ways Vikram now faces an odd crisis. He is clearly ‘the star’ in the post-Rajni era. But he has exhausted regular masala and does not wish to simply repeat things. But he might be too big for those smaller canvases of the ‘new’. It will be interesting to see how he fares but we see in any case a star who has more or less walked away from his dominant genres.
Similarly in Bombay masala cinema at one point in time answered a political need. It was the dominant paradigm for a certain cinema of protest. Today the problem precisely is that no one wants protest. We are all conformists now! And to the extent that there still is plenty of protest left in the country those audiences have been squeezed out of the multiplex economy. So it’s just a vicious cycle in Bombay.
There is a third model here of Telugu cinema. Where it’s still 1980 except for technical refinement and no one minds! In fairness though the Bollywood overlap in some of the important centers here perhaps creates a space for an over the top local cinema.
June 30, 2010 at 7:51 PM
i really really like this interviewer.
July 1, 2010 at 4:09 AM
Javed’s best attributes are his humour and his script-writing. His political views are laced with anger if provoked and disagreed to. And he’s a tad overrated as a poet… (I didn’t say lyricist…)
Still think that though he and Salim were more ‘inspired’ than original yet their ‘adapted’ scripts were mostly quite topical, and taut.
Write a film again, Javed!